Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (6 page)

Through the actions (and reactions) of the young entering culture and responding to its laws and challenges, we register a spectrum of survival skills, many of them coming at a high moral cost, as they negotiate a world they never made, trying to fathom its operation, so as to succeed. Their successes range from not starving to hustling to getting rich to opting out. They have learned. Such is the gift/price of experience.

If the journey of growing up can be fruitfully understood as the journey from innocence to experience, with all the complications that entails, we have yet to discuss head-on a prime motor force that fuels humans (both young and old) in their onward march: love. By love, I mean a wide spectrum of feelings and pulsions, replete with diverse actors and positions, ranging from the familial to the sexual, from desire to abuse, from gift to wound, from sustenance to sacrifice, from individual relationship to collective experience. One can scarcely talk about human striving without bringing love into the equation, as the lives and needs of figures such as Blake’s chimney sweep, Balzac’s Rastignac, Dickens’s Pip, and Faulkner’s Benjy, discussed earlier, make clear. But in this chapter we will focus on love explicitly as the key to young destiny, whether ecstatic romance or lacerating abuse or familial injury to social and national nightmare. What is sweetest and what is most toxic about growing up is cued to the fate of love.

Falling in love is scarcely the exclusive prerogative of the young—some people experience it all their lives, some never—but it will be admitted that it is often regarded as the most glorious discovery of youth, the galvanizing, life-altering threshold over which the young leap or plunge to enter into the affairs of the heart. The verb “fall” tells us that this experience costs you your balance and stability and says something as well about young love’s suddenness, its throbbing power, yet raises questions as to whether such passion can last. Great literary texts on this topic frequently display a mix of ecstasy and anxiety, for love catalyzes the life of the young, opens the door to feelings of an intensity hitherto unknown, but also alters—indeed, wrecks—prior notions of contours and consciousness. Subjectivity is jolted, personal longing may collide with social barriers or even with the otherness of the loved one, bringing to life and urgency much that had been quiescent or invisible, such as private wants or class lines or racial taboos, fatefully forcing the lover into a broader awareness of difference. Here begins an education for the young that is like no other.

The text I begin with is perhaps the most famous work in the Western world when it comes to young love: Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
. Shakespeare’s lyricism and poetic flights chart the terrain of love in unforgettable fashion: we see it allied to light and fire; we see how inflammatory beauty and desire are, how they transfigure the human subject, turning star-crossed lovers into new beings. But the darkness of Shakespeare’s tragedy is also central to our understanding of young love: it cannot be denied, but it cannot be fulfilled. Behind this story of parental feuding, we must recognize that the forces of death and extinction seem hardwired in the genesis and flowering of love, and that perception governs many of the great romance texts we know.

If Shakespeare’s play is known the world over, the same cannot quite be said for the French novel
Manon Lescaut
, published in 1731, and that is a pity. Abbé Prévost’s short, pithy account of a young nobleman’s infatuation with a girl of loose morals displays the “suddenness” of young love in all its destabilizing, indeed transmogrifying power: the young man, Des Grieux, becomes in short order a cheat, pander, and murderer in order to maintain his liaison with Manon. This book registers the fault lines of a culture that will explode in 1789, and it does so through the uncomprehending eyes and feelings of a young man whose love campaign is doomed to failure. Individual consciousness itself is on the docket here, as a medium of love but also as a carceral condition of subjectivity.

I then discuss two of our most canonical nineteenth-century versions of romantic love, written by two sisters: Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
and Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
. The love between Catherine and Heathcliff begins virtually in the cradle, as the deep and unbreakable bond between two lonely children—one privileged, one an orphan—and it goes on to reach a crescendo of passion, madness, death, and revenge that no reader easily forgets. Their oceanic connection is tinged with hysteria and violence, suggesting that “absolute” young love—love understood as fusion of beings—can produce a wreckage as fatal as anything ordered by the Oracle. Jane Eyre is also rightly understood as utterly marked by love—she claims it as her due from childhood on, when there is none to be had—and this rich novel tracks her quest for romantic fulfillment through a complex series of relationships, centering on the mysterious Byronic man with a secret, Edward Rochester, but also including the handsome yet cold and demanding St. John Rivers.
Jane Eyre
closes with a marriage, but much darkness, injury, discovery, and alteration are required to get there. And in both Brontës the demands of class and money possess a kind of gravity, a kind of countertug, that love must somehow contend with. Finally, in keeping with our theme, there may be reason to believe that the hurting child of each book’s beginning never quite disappears from view.

My final love text, Marguerite Duras’s
The Lover
(1984), seems a book cued to our postcolonial awareness. Over and over, this story returns to the liminal moment when the fifteen-year-old French girl on the ferry returning to Hanoi is seen, approached, and drawn into a torrid love affair by the wealthy young Chinese man who is smitten by her. What fascinates in
The Lover
is its postmodern rupture of all familiar frames—not just racial or attitudinal but narrative and libidinal—so that an entire life seems contained in embryo in this sexual initiation, so that our notion of “young love” opens out onto something immeasurably large, inflected by feelings and sensations of every stripe that bleed together into a panoramic evocation of existence where everything, like the Mekong Delta that is its locale, is in flux. It’s a story of transgression and rupture for our time: West, East, taboo, flowing feeling, love, self.

These five cardinal works of literature do justice to the sheer power and beauty of young love. Each sketches a rebirth of sorts, a molting of self that changes everything that came before while at the same time propelling the young into the oldest rhythms, gestures, and sensations known to our species. Seen together, however, Shakespeare, Prévost, the Brontës, and Duras illuminate a world that is also molting: the movement of texts from a sixteenth-century culture of honor and obedience to a mercantile exchange ethos of love in eighteenth-century Paris on to a nineteenth-century class-and-property-inflected British marriage scheme to close with an anonymous regime of pleasure in a racially conflicted twentieth-century colonial setting is a trajectory of uncommon social density. But even beyond the sharply etched societal crises looms the massive existential one: what happens to the self when it first encounters young love? Literature—given its unique capacity to write diverse subjectivities and to represent the interaction between self and setting—helps us answer that question.

All of us know that love can damage as well as delight. Like all love, young love always entails vulnerability, sometimes even bondage, and the great love stories do not minimize the loss of agency that passionate love brings, a loss that may extend to life itself. Romeo, Juliet, Des Grieux, Manon, Catherine, Heathcliff, Jane, Rochester, Duras’s narrator: all would agree. But if love may wreck us through its intensity, it may injure us still worse through its absence or its twistedness. We simply have no way of gauging the amount of suffering, horror, and evil that has resulted from love’s failures, but I suspect that much of what we take to be “history,” both private and social, has its etiology in love gone wrong. It thus follows that cruelty, sadism, exploitation, and other manifestations of feeling and power that we term “abuse” are to be logically understood in relation to love.

Yet child abuse presents challenges that are perceptual as well as ethical. It is devilishly hard for outsiders to see or measure, but it possesses an astounding potency of its own, frequently scripting the emotional life of its victims. Some writers on this topic, such as Dostoevsky, are in your face, and Ivan Karamazov offers us some chilling and unforgettable pages about such transgressions. But in many well-known literary works we have to read against the grain, peer into corners, if we are to get a fix on abuse; I’d argue that literature resembles life in this regard, by keeping its poison and garbage in cellars and closets, and it seems fair to say that reading becomes an ethical as well as cognitive activity, obliging us to parse and gauge much that is quite unaccented in the fiction. Texts by Laclos, James, and Mann will be studied in this fashion, each circling about damaged or threatened children, often obscured in the margins, as if to dare us: can you see what is actually going on here?

But the most unforgettable abuse narratives validate fully my thesis about love gone wrong. Hence we will return to those two famous nineteenth-century stories of breathless love,
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
, but now with a different perspective, cued this time to injury, and we may be surprised by what we discover. Heathcliff is the most obvious subject of our analysis, for the novel depicts what happens when oceanic love fails (or is thought to fail): it produces a monster who can never forgive or forget and who must take it out on the next generation of children. But Jane Eyre also qualifies fully (even if surprisingly) as an unloved and abused child, and even though she ends up inheriting money and marrying Rochester by book’s end, many (feminist) readers today see her repressed ongoing rage displaced onto the figure of Bertha Mason Rochester, the novel’s “madwoman in the attic,” now seen as Jane’s necessary alter ego. Take a step back from these two famous love stories, and you encounter a cartography of other libidinal forces altogether, bent on expression, wreaking havoc, displaying the “forking path” of feeling denied or killed.

My study of abused children closes with Jean Rhys’s remarkable
Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), which is nothing less than a “prequel” to
Jane Eyre
but ups the ante on Brontë (and the feminist reading of Bertha as Jane’s double) by reimagining Bertha’s story altogether. Bertha is termed “bad, mad and embruted” in
Jane Eyre
, but Rhys presents her as tragically damaged goods: hungry for love, rejected or betrayed by all those she needs, victimized by racial prejudice and coldness of heart, finally imprisoned in England. Abuse can deform you forever. Unlike CAT scans, which offer depth readings of the body, literature works to give us soul readings of this stripe, to image for us a causal emotional and psychological chain that no retina perceives.

When children die in literature, an authorial will is in play, requiring such deaths. In works by several of our most remarkable writers—Dickens, Ibsen, Kafka, and Faulkner—we see children being murdered (authorially) in quasi-systemic fashion. One is obliged to ask: What kind of psychic economy requires such sacrifice? Is it an anti–Oedipal impulse in the old that quashes the young in order to preserve its own hegemony? Or is there a dark lesson here about the threats to growing up? About the forces arrayed against the young?

We begin with Jo, the illiterate child of the slums in
Bleak House
. Without the tiniest scrap of agency, Jo is perhaps the exemplary child victim of my book, yet Dickens has the genius to make him the carrier of disease; he possesses nothing (or “nothink,” as he would say)—neither family nor money nor even the ability to read—but he spells death.
Kindermord
means “child murder”; Jo works that phrase both ways. Dickens has amplified his victimhood still further by cutting him off from language as well as love, and we read his fate systemically, virtually as ritual sacrifice. No love here. The London machine devours children.

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is known as one of Western literature’s fiercest champions of human rights, especially when it comes to the plight of women. Hence it is with shock that one encounters all the child cadavers that litter his plays. Here is the grim underside of the playwright’s emancipation scenarios: for a character to become fully adult, it appears (over and over) that a child must die. Why? Could the journey to adulthood have a built-in sacrificial mandate? At whose behest?

Child murder is still more central and pivotal in the tortured fables of Franz Kafka. Kafka himself was notoriously bullied by his father, yet he devised an artistic creed out of his low place in the food chain: the victim-son writes his demise at the hands of ogre-dad. Both “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” are keyed to these infanticidal energies, where family relations turn on murder. What kind of ballet or pas de deux is this? They are extremist stories, perhaps, but they operate according to a lethal principle that warrants our study.

My final sacrificed child is Quentin Compson of
The Sound and the Fury
. A student at Harvard with intolerable memories—Father’s drinking, Mother’s coldness, above all the quasi-incestuous bond with his vibrant and feisty sister, Caddy—he chooses death by drowning. All of Faulkner’s brilliance and pathos are on show in the writing itself, for the stream-of-consciousness narration disgorges entire chunks of family history, of remembered conversations, of manifold instances of failure—this is what inhabits Quentin on the inside—and we realize this to be a death sentence.